THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 
147 
Sacred 
to the memory of 
57 citizens of Truro, 
who were lost in seven 
vessels, which 
foundered at sea in 
the memorable gale 
of Oct. 3d, 1841. 
Their names and ages by families were recorded on dif¬ 
ferent sides of the stone. They are said to have been 
lost on George’s Bank, and I was told that only one ves¬ 
sel drifted ashore on the back side of the Cape, with the 
boys locked into the cabin and drowned. It is said that 
the homes of all were “ within a circuit of two miles.” 
Twenty-eight inhabitants of Dennis were lost in the 
same gale; and I read that “ in one day, immediately 
after this storm, nearly or quite one hundred bodies 
were taken up and buried on Cape Cod.” The Truro 
Insurance Company failed for want of skippers to take 
charge of its vessels. But the surviving inhabitants 
went a fishing again the next year as usual. I found 
that it would not do to speak of shipwrecks there, for 
almost every family has lost some of its members at 
sea. “ Who lives in that house ? ” I inquired. Three 
widows,” was the reply. The stranger and the inhab¬ 
itant view the shore with very different eyes. The 
former may have come to see and admire the ocean in 
a storm; but the latter looks on it as the scene where his 
nearest relatives were wrecked. When I remarked to 
an old wrecker partially blind, who was sitting on the 
5 dge of the bank smoking a pipe, which he had just lit 
with a match of dried beach-grass, that I supposed he 
liked to hear the sound of the surf, he answered : “ 
